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Monthly Archives: October 2008

If there’s one thing I love, it’s a good double espresso after lunch. I currently work in close vicinity to the espresso ambulanz. If you’re around Oranienburger Strasse, drop by for a coffee. You won’t regret it. Obviously I also have a thing for coffee on Polaroid. The colors go so well with the look of the film.

Sadly, Fall Polaroid Week is almost over. I have one mission left though, and this is to shoot a cupcake. It wouldn’t be Roid Week, if I didn’t.

It’s no secret, I’m a big fan of shooting film, both instant and developed. Next to Polaroid by far my favorite is medium format. I have a Pentacon Six TL and a Yashica Mat 124G, and of course a couple of plastic cameras including Holgas and a Diana+. I love shooting with all of them.

So how did I get here? Pretty much out of curiosity I picked up my sister’s Praktica BX20 for a camping trip. It was pretty much my first experience with a camera that requires you to manually set aperture and shutter timing. Not only was I blown away by the results, I didn’t even bother to use some professional film, because what did I know?

It pretty much unravelled from there. I added another BX20s (embarrassingly the first one broke), got a second Polaroid SX-70 with Sonar autofocus, and got a Holga from my girl for Christmas. I also got a Polaroid Spectra. A friend gave me his old Nikon N90 which honestly, is almost too advanced and automatic for my taste. I did get some very nice results with it on our trip to Sydney in March, but other than that I still prefer the feel of setting aperture and shutter manually.

Another friend told me he had a big medium format camera in his basement which turned out to be the Pentacon Six TL, a camera I’m seriously in love with. At some point I considered getting a Hasselblad, but why bother when you own a historic piece of East-German engineering history? And holy crap, it does take some awesome photos.

I just started piling up cameras. I can’t really say I stopped, since I recently got the Polaroid Spectra Pro and also a Yashica Mat 124G. A friend gave me his Yashica to try out, and you can’t not love a twin lens reflex camera.

Since I started shooting film I learned more about photography than I ever cared for. Little did I know about things like aperture or weird things like depth of field. Right now I’m not looking back. My digital point and shoot remains largely untouched simply because film is so awesome. I considered buying a digital SLR several times, but could never really convince myself that I really need it.

If I can recommend one thing it’s just to pick up an old camera, stuff a roll of nice film in it and start shooting with it. The excitement when you pick up freshly developed film is just something digital can’t give you. Thankfully in Berlin I have the luxury of being surrounded by labs that take two hours to develop film.

With it, she wants to encourage people to shoot more film which is obviously very fitting with my affinity to analog photography. As an ongoing special for Fall Roid Week she portraits several Polaroid photographers, and I had the honor of being included. Go check it out, and keep an eye on that blog.

To keep up with the spirit of Roid Week I went for a nice lunch walk to give the newest addition to my camera collection, a Polaroid Spectra Pro, a test drive. What’s cool about it is the manual shutter timing and multiple exposure. Other than that it’s pretty much like your normal Spectra camera.

Pretty annoying is the fact that the flash is always on by default, in fact it resets every setting to its default. Every time you pop open the camera the flash is charged. Very annoying, especially when you want to take a quick shot. I only realized it after the second shot with it and until then, no harm done.

I walked around the government district and some of the city center, and snapped a few shots. These wires especially caught my eye. Something mysterious about them.

It’s so weird trying to guess focus and distance with the Spectra cameras, but it’s good fun.

Tomorrow I’ll take a pack film camera for a spin. Roid Week is a good opportunity to walk all the cameras at least for one day. I need to do more lunch walks again too.

Last year was my first Roid Week, and I only put in a few Polaroids at that time. The next one in April already was something entirely different, and I got to feel the amazing passion and creativity that the Flickr Polaroid community has. A lot of them were sad about the doom of Polaroid, but they still put their best work into that week. It just blows my mind what these people can do with their cameras.

So, here we go again. I still have enough Polaroid film in my fridge, and lots of new cameras added to my collection since April. Time to take them all for a spin me thinks.

My wife and I started off our unofficial Roid Week with two Polaroids that would sort of announce to the Flickr world that we’re expecting, and that they can expect lots and lots of baby Polaroids from next April on.

Our friend Hannah from Kansas City sent us these awesome mini Vans slip-ons. All we need now is a skateboard, and an actual kid to put them both to use.

In case you need some inspiration for Roid Week, check out these talented people:

I’ve been looking for a new place to work. I’ve been working on-site a lot, but for the future I wanted to have an office space, best one with other awesome people around.

I love working from home and all, but there’s just too many distractions around, and it’s too easy to slack and start working late.

And well, I found just the spot. Turns out a couple of Ruby programmers, mostlysmallcompanies, lent out co-working space in their offices.

The office is about five minutes from my home, awesome! I’ve been working there for a couple of days now, and it might just be what I was looking for, close to home, with all the nice restaurants and cafes around, but still a working place.